Author: TechBrunch
The Paris Commercial Court has accepted Courtra's offer to buy CityScoot. Both of his companies offer shared electric mopeds that you can unlock and ride to get from one place to another. CityScoot was placed under court-ordered administration several months ago. Micromobility startups have grown in Europe as interest rates hover around 0%. Europe's low capital costs and dense cities have made it the perfect playground for scooter startups, bike-sharing services and electric moped companies. However, the situation took a turn for the worse as interest rates rose. Not only has it become difficult to raise funds, but it has…
Uber has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Indian government-backed company aimed at making mobility and commerce more accessible across South Asia. The ride-hailing giant announced Thursday that it will explore integration with the Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) to expand the range of mobility services on its Uber app. At an event in Bangalore, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Uber is “very interested in the open source technology stack and recognizes the opportunities it presents for everyone.” said. “We are taking the first step through this MoU with ONDC to explore how we can accelerate our ambition…
Instagram today announced that it is expanding its marketplace tools to connect brands and creators for paid partnerships and advertising in eight new countries. New markets with access to this marketplace include Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Japan, India, and Brazil. The company first began testing the platform in the U.S. in 2022. Since then, it said it has brought in “thousands” of creators and brands. Last year, the social media company added API capabilities to empower creators and build briefs. He encouraged agencies to use the platform. Mehta added that in addition to making the platform available to brands…
Southeast Asia is home to a growing number of vertical AI startups serving a wide range of sectors, from seafood to finance. Singapore-based venture capital firm Antler recently bet on 37 of them, investing a total of $5.1 million in pre-seed deals. This included a strategic partnership with Malaysian sovereign wealth fund Khazanah, which invested in seven startups. “If you look at other parts of the world, there's a lot of horizontal AI and it's becoming very competitive,” Antler co-founder and managing partner Jussi Salovaara tells TechCrunch. “What founders in this part of the world are increasingly trying to solve…
Samsung announced today that it will bring Galaxy AI capabilities to more devices through the new One UL 6.1 update, released in late March. This feature is available on the Galaxy S23 series, S23 FE, Z Fold5, Z Flip5, as well as the Tab S9 Ultra, Tab S9+, and Tab S9. The AI feature was first introduced to the Galaxy S24 series, but will soon be available to more Samsung users. With nearly every technology company introducing and expanding its AI-powered capabilities, it makes sense for Samsung to make its capabilities more widely available. Image credits: samsung This upcoming update…
US healthcare technology giant Change Healthcare has confirmed a cyber attack on its systems. “We are experiencing network interruptions related to cybersecurity issues,” the company said in a brief statement. “After becoming aware of the external threat, to protect our partners and patients, we took immediate action to disconnect our systems to prevent further impact,” Change Healthcare wrote on its status page. ing. “Disruption is expected to continue at least throughout the day.” The incident began early Tuesday morning on the East Coast of the United States, according to case tracking authorities. The specific details of the cybersecurity incident have…
Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks such as Mastodon in a sustained spam attack organized on Discord and executed using the Discord application. However, Discord has not yet removed the server that facilitated the attack, and Mastodon community leaders have not been able to contact anyone within the company. “The attack was coordinated through Discord, and the software was distributed through Discord,” said the author, who regularly addresses issues of trust and safety for Fediverse, a network of decentralized social platforms built on the ActivityPub protocol. said Emelia Smith, a software engineer at “They were using a bot…
The tech-wide reckoning that began in 2022 and ran throughout into 2023 has continued into this year. And while 2024’s losses are not at that scale, they’re still significant, driven by big names like Pixar, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and TikTok. It remains to be seen if this year’s layoff trends follow last year’s, in which layoffs slowed down in the summer, before cuts began ramping up yet again toward the winter. Momentum for a tech sector rebound remains slow to build, outside of bright spots within artificial intelligence and adjacent companies, resulting in tech companies continuing to cut back on…
Creative advertising agency McKinney has developed a quiz game called “Are You Blacker than ChatGPT?” To shed light on AI bias. This game tests an individual's knowledge of Black culture against what ChatGPT has been trained to know about the Black community. Ask questions like, “What does it mean when someone says, 'I don't really care about it right now?'” and “How would you react if you were invited to an event?” When I took the quiz, both ChatGPT and I answered the first quiz correctly. When someone says, “Don't worry too much about it,” it usually means going easy…
Hundreds of people in the artificial intelligence community have signed an open letter calling for strict regulation of AI-generated impersonations, or deepfakes. While this is unlikely to spur actual legislation (despite the House's new special committee), it will certainly serve as a bellwether for how experts lean on this controversial issue. It is. At the time of publication, the letter had been signed by more than 500 people involved in the AI field, stating, “Deepfakes pose a growing threat to society, and governments must impose obligations across the supply chain to stop the spread of deepfakes.'' “There must be,” he…